What I plan to do with my wedding dress...

A photographer friend of mine (different than the friend who did my wedding{do I have some talented friends or what?!}) offered to do a day-after-wedding photo shoot, er...months-after-wedding...and after doing some googling some ideas, I'm stoked! I didn't have a 'real' engagement photoshoot because I needed to send invites RIGHT THEN so I just had my friend go down the road with us until we got a picture that was good to send out with the invites, so it will be nice to have photos not from the wedding.

I was searching for some unique trash the dress ideas to see if I wanted to do that, which led me to some great ideas for the future for my dress, since I'm not actually going to ruin my dress if I do a trash the dress shoot. It may have only been 40-ish dollars from a sales rack, but I am attached to it in the I married my husband in this and don't want to just get rid of it kind of way.

A lot of people cut their dress up to make things like pillows (um, not my kind of decor, white pillows?!), christening gowns (not religious), or to decorate their wedding albums (despite the fact that I LOVE scrapbooking, I want my photos to be in a simple album on black paper) but I'd prefer to keep my dress whole. There's not a whole lot of fabric to it, and it seems too wasteful! BUT I don't want to just have it hang in my closet.

So the first ongoing idea that I am SUPER happy with is to wear it every year on our anniversary for a date. My dress isn't over the top at all so I'd look slightly fancy, but not like a crazy woman trying to re-live her glory years. It's a fun way to continue wearing it and I love the idea of getting dressed up like that with my husband. If I age like my Gram (which I think/hope I will) then I'm bound to fit in my dress years from now!

Another fun idea is to have a bride's party! I'm accumulating (this doesn't feel like the proper word, but I'm too brain dead to think of anything else) more friends that are married and I think it would be a great night to all get together and talk about our husbands and our weddings...or just get drunk. Once summer comes around and a BBQ in the sun with sangria can take place, I'm definitely going to put this together. It would be fun to have people that aren't married as well and just have them wear bridesmaids dresses! It could just be a fun ladies evening in fancy dresses.

For the married ladies out there, what did you do with your wedding dress? For the non-married ladies, do you have an idea of what you want to do with your wedding dress?


P.S. Both my awesome photographer friends are on Facebook...like their pages here and here and see their amazing talent!

Thankful Thursday

This is a short one...but I'm so thankful to finally have pictures with me and some of my favorite ladies!!

 Tulasi Devi Photography and Design

Tulasi Devi Photography and Design

Link up!

Video montage from the wedding!

I'm still waiting to get some pictures back from my photographer, but until then Vince's dad Dave sent us a video of the pictures that he and his wife Amy took at the wedding. I absolutely love it and totally cried when I watched it, and then cried again when I re-watched it today and then cried again when I uploaded it onto YouTube. It's just so great! Some of the pictures might not interest you all because you don't know my family, but I wanted to share it!

And if you don't want to watch the whole thing, at least skip to 1:50. There is some video footage from the bike parade and us walking into the reception! It is DEFINITELY my favorite part of the video!

Also, this is my new favorite song. ♥

Oh, look...

...a new blog design!

There have been a few people in the blogging world changing things up and I was inspired.

I've also been doing a lot of changes in my house which I am SO excited to blog about soon. Sometimes I'm just too damn lazy to get up off the couch, though, so instead of my house, I change my blog! Vince probably appreciates me sitting on the couch until 1am doing blog stuff instead of nail-gunning the headboard I'm making, which is what I'm about to do after I eat some dinner...

I'll be sure to post about the big changes in my house as they continue to progress. This is something I am extremely excited about and am so glad I've somehow found the inspiration for it! I've been focusing on our bedroom that has never had a single thing hung in it. I'm creating some art for the walls and a headboard, and I'm figuring out new dressers, bedspreads, and curtains.

I've also had the itch to blog more again, so be ready for me. I've got tons of DIY posts that I have to do from wedding stuff as well, like the fabric bouquets in mason jars I made for the wedding. Aren't they adorable?

Photographer: Tulasi Devi Photography & Design

So anyways, what do you think of the new design? I might change it up a bit still because I think it needs more color, but we'll see...

After waiting 7 weeks, now what?

The wedding will probably be broken up into a few posts as pictures come in, but for now, I'll share some of my random thoughts on it and a sneak peak of the photo that my photographer Tulasi posted on Facebook!

Photographer credit: Tulasi Devi Photography & Design + Facebook

In a way I feel like nothing has changed. Vince and I already have a fully established life together, we've been living together for a few years, and nothing has physically changed in our lives. Ya, we now have an amazing KitchenAid and stainless steel pans, but nothing else is out of the ordinary. We still have our boring jobs, we still wake up together, and we still obsess over when the next Dexter disc will arrive in the mail.

After the ceremony happened and I had some time to think the next day, I felt kind of sad (though that isn't the right word because I wasn't sad, I was something else...?). There was so much going on before the wedding, things were exciting, and we were taking a huge step! I had so much of my time and energy focused on the wedding that once the big day came and went, I was kind of like, 'Now what?' Kind of like those stupid t-shirts that say 'I survived ... and all I got was a t-shirt.' I felt like I should have a t-shirt that said, 'I stressed over a wedding for 7 weeks and had everything turn out perfect and all I got was this t-shirt.'

After contemplating things for a while, I realized that I like that nothing is really changing and I am so incredibly happy with where we are. It's stressful enough having a wedding and dealing with all the family and friends in the same place. I would hate to have to move in together and have to learn all the new quirks about each other! We definitely have a lot to learn about each other through our lives, but I am so happy I'm not learning for the first time that Vince ALWAYS puts the toilet paper roll on backwards or that he frequently leaves juice on the counter instead of putting it away.

I'm no longer 'sad' because I know that we have SOOO so so many more exciting adventures awaiting us. We have vacations to take, children to have, houses to buy, careers to evolve, and I still have to get my name changed! We still have our whole lives ahead of us and it's really exciting in itself to know that I'll have my love by my side. I know that he is mine, and I am his, and we have each other to support and lean on!

She done got skunked.

(This happened last week, and I wrote the post and forgot to actually post it! So here ya go...)

And she's not happy about it.

On Wednesday night at work, I was talking to a coworker about skunk smells. I attempted to explain the horrible smell of a skunk and I couldn't. It's a smell that smells NOTHING like a skunk, and it gets in you lungs and burns. It's just horrible and it literally makes me uncontrollably gag. I said that Roxanne had gotten sprayed before and that I hoped I had never had to smell it again.

Well. That didn't happen. She got skunked on Thursday!

I had asked Vince to get a bag of wedding stuff from the car and he decided to leave the back door open when he went out to let Roxanne roam. I've told him five and a half million times to lot let her go outside of the fence without her leash on, and he always tells me every time that she's fine.

I was sitting on the floor in the living room and noticed that it was taking Vince a really long time to come back inside. Then I started smelling skunk and I jumped up to run to tell Vince to hurry and get inside. As I got closer to the back door the smell was SO horrible and I knew she ad gotten sprayed. I screamed at Vince, 'Are you kidding?! She got sprayed?!' And then he said he wasn't sure and asked if I could smell her. Ha. I could smell her from the front of the house!

I then started crying and freaking out and Vince told me to stop. I then yelled, 'We're getting married in a fucking week and I have so much stuff to do and our dog got SPRAYED BY A SKUNK. SHUT UP. Let me freak out.' And he said, 'Ok!' and that was that.

After a moment of panic I went through the motions of getting the stuff to clen her up and unlike last time she got sprayed, I was smart. I left her outside, poured some skunk-off stuff, and let her partially dry.

She knew she was a complete idiot and that it was her fault. Last time she got sprayed she acted all scared, and this time, she KNEW she shouldn't have done that. I kept calling her name and she refused to make eye contact with me, hanging her head in shame. DAMN RIGHT, ROXANNE.

Vince was kind enough to sit in the front yard with her while she dried, even though it was cold and rainy. He said too close though and she jumped up on him! I was screaming, 'Don't let her touch your clothes! Don't do it!' That scared her, and probably our neighbors since it was like 12:30am at this point.

Then brought her inside for a bath. We kept her tied up to the backdoor for the night and a couple days, but she's smelling a little better now. The morning after I washed her again with peroxide, baking soda, and Dawn and it definitely helped.

One of the nights I tied her up to the front door while I ran an errand, and when I came back, she managed to get up on the couch, on top of all my wedding fabric! Luckily she wasn't extremely sticker like the night before.

I'm just glad our house doesn't smell super bad like skunk like it did last time!

S.T.R.E.S.S.E.D. For real.

Whew. I haven't been around the blogosphere much lately, but I have some good excuses. Well one, mainly: STRESS.

It's been a healthy stress though. It's not one that's keeping me up at night, or one that makes me eat tub after tub of ice cream. It's a good one that makes me realize that life is upon me. It feels like up until this point I was just...here. I wasn't doing anything spectacular with my life, nothing life changing. I was getting scared that I'd be like this forever.

I got my GED when I was 16 and moved out when I was 17. I started taking classes at the community college and I was working full time between two jobs, so compared to my 'peers' who were still in school, I was kind of living the life! I got to pick my schedule, didn't have parents to control me, and I had somewhat disposable income. I was way ahead of them with college classes, so if I wanted, I could have graduated college early.

BUT. That didn't happen. I realized that rent and groceries and gas money cost a whole lot. I realized that it's a whole lot harder to work and go to school at the same time, and I wasn't ready for that. So, because we live in a money-central world, I chose to work instead of go to school. I still felt cool that I had a full time job with the city with full benefits and was making WAY more than my friends did when I was 18, but that coolness is starting to wear off.

Some of them are going to graduate next year, and where does that leave me? At least two years behind them in school. But hey, at least I have my high paying job!

But now I realize that I want to go to school and work. It's worth the sacrifice to me. Ya, I may not have a social life, but I don't care much about that. I'll still make time a few hours here and there throughout the week with friends, but I'm not the type to go hangout and party for hours anyways.

On Monday I am starting school. I haven't talked about school since this post, but things DID fall into place! I am taking my Certified Nursing Assistant class at the time I wanted, and then I'm taking AHS 131, a medical terminology class, online. So total, I am taking 9 credits, in addition to working 40 hours a week and watching my neice for 8 hours every Friday while my sister is in school. That accounts for 57 hours of my week, NOT including homework time. That's a lot, and I'm kind of nervous about it. I'm still in the midst of planning a wedding, and then in the middle of all this I'm going to HAVE a wedding!

I've realized that I have to come up with some kind of schedule for how my days are going to be. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to clean my house, do the laundry (at the dreaded laundry mat) cook dinner, and enjoy time with my fiance. Luckily Vince is going to do his own laundry now! A lot of the time we do it together, but he always has twice, if not THREE times as much laundry because his clothes are bigger and he has his riding gear for bikes.

The most important thing out of the list is my fiance, but after that it's food. I don't care if I have to wear the same shirt twice or if I have to wash a dish in order to eat some cereal. I just need to have healthy food that will sustain me throughout the day. If I don't have that, all bets are off and I will lose my shit.

So I'm going to start planning my meals again and have somewhat scheduled internet time, exercising time, friend time, etc. Once I figure out what I'm going to do over the next few days, I'll share it with you. I know I like any kind of scheduling tips, so I figure I'll share mine! Let me know if you have any good ones, too!

Cramps and wedding stuff...what?

Today I FAINTED at work. What from, you ask? Because I was having menstrual cramps that were so painful. Stupid, and it makes me hate being a girl. Luckily I felt it coming on before it happened and I went on my break and sat down on the floor. I felt horrible because I had to call my boss in to cover the last hour of my shift because I just couldn't do it anymore.

When I got home I did a few yoga moves that helped tremendously, but not nearly as well as laying down makes me feel. If you want some good yoga poses to help cramps, try this site. My absolute favorite that ALWAYS helps is the wide squat pose. When I get cramps it spreads to my back and my thighs which totally sucks, but this pose helps quite a bit. My stepmom taught me that years ago and I'm so glad I know about it!

So now here I am, laying on the couch with an enormous amount of energy, yet I'm not able to do a thing about it.

So I'm going to show you a few things that may be wedding accessories. To start off with, the wedding colors are seafoam blue/green and deep plum.

I want all the flowers to be fabric because I like the look and the cost better, but I haven't decided on any yet. I've made a couple of them, but I think this style might be my favorite:

I made these flowers for a necklace for my bridesmaids using, and I think I'll have my ladies come over and make their own one night. (I can't find the link to the tutorial, but if I find it again I'll be sure to link it!)

I think they are super pretty and will go well with the black dresses we've picked out! I've added a black chain to it to match the dresses.

After I made this necklace, I made another one with the same style flowers but the blue flowers are a different size than the plum ones, which I actually like better. I didn't take a picture of the other necklace because it was after dark, and I definitely don't want to take any today, but I'll post it up soon! It's the one I'm probably going to go with anyways, or maybe a small scale version of this one.

Also, to bring more color to the bridesmaids black dresses, I like this flower for the rings:

I made it using this tutorial, and I'm in love with the ring. I want to make a bunch more in different colors just to wear! I wrapped the silver band with the plum fabric, but I'm not quite sure if I like it. I'll probably just let the bridesmaids pick what they want.

Annnnd that's all I've done for the wedding aside from invitations, which I plan on posting about later. Ya, considering it's LESS than 6 weeks away I should probably get a move on it, but whatev. 

I'm great under pressure!

Thank you, thank you very much.

Every Wednesday I participate in the Indie Ink Writing Challenge. This week I challenged K. Syrah, and Carrie challenged me with: 'Pick your favorite Elvis song and write a 500 word story using the lyrics as inspiration.' 

As an awkward kid who hadn't yet figured out how to handle his body, I was capable of doing two things really well: the Elvis lip curl and his well-known phrase of, ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’ You know the one that the ladies supposedly would swoon over and that only a select few can pull off? Granted, I could only achieve it when I was alone and in my bathroom in front of the mirror, but hey, to me that still counted.

Even though most of my friends never actually listened to Elvis, it was the cool thing to try and do at recess. We would all sit in a circle in the large grassy field, looking at each other and screwing our faces up, hoping that maybe, just maybe, one of us would pull it off in front of someone so we could be considered the coolest kid ever.

One day, after sitting in front of the mirror for hours the previous night, I decided at recess that I would tell everyone that I had perfected it: I was totally capable of doing the Elvis lip curl and sounding exactly like him.

Everyone stopped scrunching up their faces and focused completely on me, and me alone. No one was practicing their lip curl, no one was trying to perfect the tone of their voice; all eyes were on me and this was going to be the best glory moment of my young life.

Not one of us in the group had ever made such a big deal as I. Most of the time the other kids would say, ‘I’m getting a little closer! Can you tell? Can you?’ But me, being the cocky person that I am, straight up said, ‘Hey guys, I can totally do the lip curl and sound like Elvis, it’s like the easiest thing in the world. You seriously can’t? Ha!’

And honestly, in front of the mirror I could! I would reach into the little throat of mine and out would come the growly voice of the King himself and my lip would curl in the most perfect of ways that, had the King still been alive, would have made him jealous.

But in front of a group of friends where I was already the ‘loser’ of the group? Ya, it was a little harder.

So I sat there, with my butt getting damp from the green grass, with all eyes on me. I tried to block everyone from my view. I tried to imagine them naked or in their underwear. Heck, I even tried to imagine them in granny panties complete with a wig! But it didn’t work. I attempted the lip curl and my face completely froze up. NOTHING. And that deep growly voice that was supposed to come out didn’t show itself. Instead, a tiny squeak emitted from my throat. My glory moment was officially ruined and after that day I never tried to channel my inner Elvis again.

So, funny story: When Vince and I were talking about music for our wedding last week, I said that my only rule would be NO ELVIS. I don't know why I don't really like his music, but I just don't. I know, I'm probably the only person in the world, but I can't help it! So imagine my surprise when my prompt was about none other than Elvis himself. And it had to be 500 words. (Which I got exactly right!) I was a little worried that my writing would be crap, and I was actually dreading it! I guess that's where the word 'challenge' comes in...

I know I didn't follow the prompt to a 'T' because I was supposed to choose a song as inspiration, and I instead chose to use the phrase after his songs, but I had a lot of fun writing this. It isn't exactly a story from my childhood, but as a kid I did always try to perfect that little trademarks of Elvis'!

I'm gettin' me a husband!

You read that correctly, I’m getting married! After wanting to be engaged for so long, I am now finally able to call Vince my fiancé! Agh! I’m so excited. I won’t be able to call him my fiancé for very long though, because we will be married in SEVEN WEEKS. Ya, no time at all! And no, I am NOT pregnant. Hehe.

My grandparents on my dad’s side are most likely going on their LDS mission in January and I HAVE to have them at my wedding. I of course have to make things a little harder by wanting to get married by the end of summer so it can be outside!

So the date we have set for the wedding is Saturday, September 17, 2011. I am so excited for that day to come. Even though I know it will come a lot sooner than I expected, it seems so far away!

I have three amazing bridesmaids and maid of honor, and oh man, am I going to put them to work. One of my bridemaids, Annie, already helped me pretty much plan the entire wedding before I was able to even announce to everyone that I was engaged! We got together, she just rattled off a list of questions and I answered them, and just like that we were done! It was pretty great. Now we just have to worry about collecting everything, making everything, and in general putting everything together. This is where the rest of the bridesmaids come in handy!

Vince and I are not expecting money from either of our families, so we are doing this on a TIGHT budget. Considering we had almost nothing in our savings account last week due to our move, this will be quite a challenge for us! We are getting money from the deposit from our old apartment and we sold our washer and dryer, which gives us a pretty good buffer. Our new rent is also a lot cheaper, so we’ll be saving a bunch of money that way!

I plan on giving you all the details money-wise though in case anyone ever wants to plan a super cheap yet elegant wedding, so stay tuned! 

Yay, I’m so excited, I'll have more details in the upcoming weeks!